1 for 17? Carroll moms swing and miss on priceless gift

Not the cartoon, but this wonderful plastic transistor radio shaped like the silly rabbit. No trick for this kid. That radio worked. For ball games. Bee Gees songs, maybe a Gerald Ford comment here and there - whatever was happening in 1975, when I was 6 years old, living in Indianola.

My grandfather was still alive, running this newspaper, so we hadn't joined the family firm yet. That would come four years later after his death.

But on this fall night, adults gathered early in the evening at our home near the Simpson College campus where my father taught music theory and organ. Mom and dad dispatched me upstairs, to the company of Bugs - and the local AM station.

My mother, Ann Wilson, now the publisher of The Daily Times Herald, found herself in a three-candidate race for two seats on the Indianola Community School Board.

As a grade-schooler, I thought the world might crash into Jupiter if mom lost this campaign. How can anyone vote against my mom?

I laid nervously in bed as the school-board-election results arrived. Mom, then 34, earned one of those school board seats that night. Bugs no doubt smiled as I jumped around on the mattress.

Mom's the only elected official we've had in the modern era of the Wilson family. My grandfather, James W. Wilson, a Barry Goldwater man, failed in a bid as Republican for a Statehouse seat here in Carroll when the county bled blue, such was the weight of the Democratic imbalance during his half century here.

I thought about mom's election night - the first election I can recall - today as the filing period opened for Carroll City Council seats.

On the 17 local policy-making elected seats for the City of Carroll (six on the council, the mayor's slot, five county supervisors and five Carroll Community School Board members) resides but a lone female, Carroll City Councilwoman Carolyn Siemann.

Over the years, living in a state that joins Mississippi in the ignominious distinction of never having elected a woman as governor, to the U.S. Senate or House, I've talked to hundreds of politicians and academics and voters about gender bias, strategy, demographics and other confounding factors for female candidates.

Lately, though, around here, what I'm hearing from women is that they don't want to run, can't do it, because there's not the time.

They are worried that somehow they'll be something less to the children - less available, less energetic, less focused, less mommy.

All of which is spectacularly well-intentioned and, oddly, remarkably hard to challenge.

But it's just dead wrong.

The mom who runs for a local office is so much more to her kids the moment she files the papers, puts her name on the line.

She's an in-home civics lesson. She's the embodiment of triumph of courage in one's ideas over fear of the public square and the humiliation and defeat entrants to it risk.

Her kids see her fighting for them, to make their schools and town better. It inspires kids to expect more from themselves, to strive in the classroom, to see the world outside of the self.

So enough with the nonsense excuses. The best thing a mom in Carroll can do for her kids is to run for the school board or council or supervisors.

Carroll's overarching strategy is to create a community that's attractive for young families. For this to work, to take full and real form, graduate from the cleverly crafted words of shelved strategic-planning documents, we need moms in rooms that matter.